For people who don’t know what DI, or Destination Imagination, is it is a program in which students from elementary school to high school partake in an annual event where students showcase their creations to an audience. Their creations have to do with a challenge, which teams are assigned to do and solve by the time DI Regionals roll around. Regionals is the first step in Destination Imagination, followed by Provincials and finally, Globals. This post will talk about my group, our challenge, our solution and performance at the DI regionals.
St. Georges School, Home of DI Regionals 2017
I was with a group including Kyle, Ethan, Simon and Calum. Together we created a performance that showcased a moving stage. Our challenge was to create a moving stage and somehow incorporate it into our performance. The stage has to move one person from one location to another sometime in the performance. We also had to have two technical effects that had to happen throughout the play. The two effects had to have some technical innovation in it and had to be visible and noticed by the audience and appraisers.
Our Challenge, Show and Tech
When we got our challenge, all of us appointed a DRI, or directly responsible individual, somebody who guided and leaded the group. They chose me to lead, as I have experience being a leader and most of my class also thinks of me as a responsible and accountable person. Once we figured that out, we had to brainstorm, brainstorm about our storyline, script, stage design and technical effects. We started with he story. Many ideas were thrown around, like an injured sports player, space travel and others, but we ultimately chose to do time travel as our focus on the story. The story was of a young farmer, who travels through time to experience the future. Once he interacts with technology and the future, he wants to go back. He then finds his future self, working on a time machine and goes back in time. The conclusion ens with a twist, as once the farmer travels back, it goes right back to the start. This represents the loop he encounters in his dreams.
The next step was to create our stage. The rules state that we get more points for having a technical design that pulls our stage. This means we had to create something that would move the stage without us pullling or touching it. Our group thought of a few ideas, but in the end we chose to use a pulley system incorporating weights that would move the stage and the person. Somebody had to be on the stage, so we chose the lightest person, who was Calum, to be moved by our technical innovation. Our stage was designed to look like a time machine, so our group spray painted it grey, put a dashboard on it and added buttons to the stage. We added wheels so we could make the stage move, then added a rope that would eventually be pulled by the pulley.
A Drawing Representing of our Stage and Pulley Design, with the Stage to the Left and Weights and Stand to the Right
Our group worked on our stage for a week right before our first dress rehearsal. At our dress rehearsal, we got a lot of feedback about our story. The audience said that it was very vague and unfinished. We took these notes and started to expand and minimize our storyline, making it easier to follow, but interesting enough that people would get bored at our presentation. Our stage was also unfinished at the time of the dress rehearsal, so we worked on that heavily throughout the rest of the time until regionals. After our first draft and performance, we focused on our tech effects, things that would play throughout our performance that would amaze the audience. One of our tech effects was flashing lights. The lights would be at the very opening of the performance and symbolized a nightmare one of our characters had in the story. Our second technical effect was the LED lights that our group coded. Calum coded lights that would act as the turning on of the time machine. They flashed red, blue and white in a similar pattern that a futuristic machine would.
That last week before regionals was a tough one. We finalized our stage and storyboard, and started to prepare for regionals. We worked very hard during and after school. We would come to school early, fixing up the stage or scripts and afterwards, rehearse for Saturday.
Simon Working on our Weight Stand
By the time Saturday came around, it was time for us to perform. We set up and practiced our acts and time machine. Everything was working and doing well, but we would soon find out not everything was perfect. It was time to perform. The appraisers announced our group, and we began. The first act began with a farm scene, finishing with our main character, Calum, finding the time machine. He took it out, placed the weights, and, it didn’t move. The stage didn’t move and all the weights did was make the stand for the weights fall over. Calum got off to begin the next act, and then the stage fell on the ground, we picked it up and kept going. The part from when the stage moved to the time where Calum fixes the machine was perfect and our story was well rehearsed. Then it was time to move the stage again. Calum stood up on the stage, put down the weights and once again, it didn’t move. The weights flipped the stand and the stage moved around a foot. Simon then took the stage by hand and moved it, concluding our performance.
I was very dissapointed with our stage, as it worked perfectly fine beforehand. Our group and I felt terrible, but other than the stage not actually moving, we scored quite high, and we scored first in our challenge and instant challenge. Once our group heard the results, we were all quite surprised, but also proud of our accomplishment. Our group was invited to go to provincials, our next chapter in our DI experience. For that, we have to actually make the stage move in order to do well, so all of us will plan to work on that. Provincials is supposed to occur in around a month, so be expecting another post by then.
This is only part one of our DI adventure, and im excited to see what’s around the corner. See you next time!